Christian Bale is, for a lot of people, synonymous with playing Batman.
While promoting David O. Russell’s new film Amsterdam, which hasn’t exactly captured critics’ imaginations, Bale decided to talk to GQ about some much better films instead: The Dark Knight Trilogy.
For Affleck was mocked, the jury’s still out on Pattinson, but most agree on the quality of Bale’s performance as the caped crusader. And it turns out the British actor hoped the success of the trilogy could help him quit his profession.
“I loved that because I was like, ‘This could be it. I could never be anything but that.’ And for a lot of people, I won’t,” he said. “I was like, ‘Ah, maybe I’m going to be forced to go do something different.’ And maybe this fucking thing [acting] that I got forced into doing as a kid that I didn’t fucking want to do in the first place, I’m out. And I’m free. And then it didn’t happen.”
The trilogy might have been massive for several years, but Bale still found a way to escape the Batman noise. “I always just felt like it was a thing that someone else did, really, in a lot of ways,” he told GQ. “I was like, ‘Oh, yeah. That thing happened over there. And that’s doing very well over there, I hear. That’s great.’ And I’m going off to Ralphs, the supermarket, to get bananas.”
According to Bale, playing a main character like Batman never suited him anyway. “I’ve never considered myself a leading man. It’s just boring. You don’t get the good parts,” he said.
“Even if I play a lead, I pretend I’m playing like, you know, the fourth, fifth character down, because you get more freedom. I also don’t really think about the overall effect that [a character’s] going to have. It’s for me to play around, much like animals and children do. Have tunnel vision about what you’re doing, not think about the effect you’re having.”
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Elsewhere in the GQ interview, Bale revealed the industry power of Leonardo DiCaprio. Look, to this day, any role that anybody gets, it’s only because he’s (DiCaprio) passed on it beforehand,” he insisted.
“It doesn’t matter what anyone tells you. It doesn’t matter how friendly you are with the directors. All those people that I’ve worked with multiple times, they all offered every one of those roles to him first. Right? I had one of those people actually tell me that. So, thank you, Leo, because literally, he gets to choose everything he does. And good for him, he’s phenomenal.”
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